New Year’s Cooking (and eating) Resolutions

January 4, 2013, 3:04 pm

Learn New Recipes - Pick out a cookbook from your bookcase or buy a nice new one and resolve to make one new recipe a week (or a month). Try a recipe with unique ingredients that you’ve never used before. You will expand your palate, cooking repertoire, and possibly create new favorites. Jot down notes right in the cookbook along with the date for future reference.

Take a cooking class – Have fun in a group environment learning new techniques and ingredients from a professional. This is a great way to take the mystery out of cooking when you have someone right there to answer your questions. Check out our line up of classes.

Make your own salad dressings and vinaigrettes – Homemade vinaigrettes and dressings taste superior to bottled dressings and cost less to make. Click here for recipes.

Make something complicated from scratch, just for the fun of it. How about cinnamon rolls, homemade pasta, or apple pie.

Make your own broths for best flavor and maximum nutrition. Concentrated soup bases and canned/boxed broths are convenient but they lack the nutrition and flavor complex of slow simmered bone broths. Broth is excellent for soups, stews, gravies, braising liquids, and just to drink as a healing tonic. Download a pdf of bone broth recipes here.

Invest in good quality cook ware. At a minimum, a good chef’s knife, heavy-bottomed saucepans and skillets. Also, no cook should be without a pepper grinder, salad spinner, internal thermometer, digital timer, a variety of wet and dry measuring utensils, an immersion blender, and a box grater with different size holes.

Learn more about making fermented foods at home. Fermented foods are not difficult to make, are loaded with enzymes, and help to restore the beneficial bacteria in the gut. They improve digestion and actually increase the vitamin content of foods. Our ancestors routinely preserved food through lacto-fermentation and it has only been in recent times that we have dropped this time-honored tradition. You can make sauerkraut and other vegetable ferments, as well as beverages like kombucha. Kefir and yogurt are also easy to make at home. Learn more>